Aspiration is proud to be partnering with Mozilla to drive the local event strategy for their Drumbeat project. Aspiration will help to prototype what Drumbeat Local events look like across the globe, and train local organizers in how to design and run their own Drumbeat events. The event format and philosophy will be based on Aspiration’s own facilitation methodology.

What is Mozilla Drumbeat? With the aim of finding the next cool ideas that will make the web more open, Mozilla has created Drumbeat, with the goal of better connecting and growing the global community of people using web technology to understand, participate and take control of their online lives. Drumbeat provides a forum for people to share project ideas — and matches the most promising ideas with contributors, funds and guidance. For more information, visit the Drumbeat site.

Mozilla is also looking for local partners and leaders to help them engage the global community of people passionate about keeping the web vibrant and open.

Aspiration was delighted to design and facilitate a focus group for Craigslist Foundation’s latest project, code-named What Works, in San Francisco at the end of January. The goal of the project is to assess the degree to which stories and ideas about successful community change can help others achieve success in their own communities. And to the extent that they do, to then investigate how to better get that information distributed where it needs to go. The agenda addressed topics including what motivates people to share their success stories, which organizations are already doing work in related areas, and what audiences and communities might be most in need of this kind of improved information flow.

Participating organizations included Bush Foundation, Causecast, Craigslist.org, IBM, Google.org, The Open Planning Project, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, Wikimedia Foundation, WiserEarth, as well as social media sensei Beth Kanter, Fellow at the Packard Foundation.

Aspiration was delighted to deliver another webinar in TechSoup’s most excellent webinar series, entitled Integrating Social Media into Your Website.

The webinar was offered twice, on January 19th and February 4th.

It was also picked for republishing by CharityHowto.com.

Webinar Overview

More and more organizations are benefiting from using social media tools like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter in their online communications. While the tools can be relatively straightforward to learn and adopt, many organizations struggle with how to effectively align messaging and communications across their online channels.

This webinar will focus on best practices for integrating social media into organizational websites, including basic nuts-and-bolts changes to web page templates and enhancements to contact, staff, and email sign-up pages. Effective and simple processes for coordinating various channels and maximizing traffic between them will be explained. In addition, a range of contrasts will be drawn describing the different natures and uses of the respective channels, and methods for measuring how different channels are driving traffic to one another will be presented.

Hot off the presses, our end-of-year newsletter is yours for the clicking. In this edition:

• Nonprofit Software Dev Summit Caps a Rich Year of Events
• eAdvocacy Mentoring and Capacity Building Enters 4th year
• Help Us Test the Answr Platform
• New Aspiration Book: Open Translation Tools
• Doing Our Part to Create Better Tools and Resources

And if you didn’t receive the newsletter by email, please consider joining our mailing list. It’s low-volume and targeted at people who care about improving the state of software for social change.

Aspiration was giddy happy to be invited to present the latest, greatest version of our “What Should A Web Site Cost” slideware on TechSoup’s December Webinar.

The online event was attended by over 200 great folks who posed excellent questions and comments. You can check out the audio from the webinar, as well as the resource list of great web site implementors and designers.

Thanks to Kami Griffiths at TechSoup for inviting us on over!

Aspiration is delighted to announce that William (Bill) Lester has joined our Board of Directors, effective immediately. Welcome Bill!

Bill is the Executive Director of NonProfit Organizations Knowledge Initiative (NPOKI). A visionary in use of Information and Communications Technologies (particularly in low-resource settings), Bill is well-known in the nonprofit knowledge management and technology communities, and is a popular speaker at many industry gatherings. As Chief Information Officer for EngenderHealth for 15 years, Bill has been instrumental in capturing and sharing the organization’s operational and programmatic best practices and lessons learned. In 2007, he was honored with NTEN’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Bill was elected to the Board of InsideNGO (formerly APVOFM) in 2008. He was an NTEN board member from 2000 - 2007, participates on the advisory committees for NPOWER and KABISSA, and is a NPOKI founding member. A strong proponent of social entrepreneurship, Bill works worldwide to promote and encourage problem-solvers. His personal mission is “Imagine-Build-Connect”.

We are happy and honored to welcome such a passionate and committed innovator to the Aspiration family.

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